The growth of the Internet introduced broad access to information not available before. Access to digital information sources, once an asset of a small group of professional, holding information technology skills, has become a daily tool for millions of the Internet users.
Lower skill levels for search of such information is now an inseparable part of searches made for information by most of the users. Skill and knowledge aspects became limiting factors for successful search and retrieve of such information.
Such limitations present themselves in the composition of Boolean queries, knowledge of relevant information sources such as the AltaVista index at www.altavista.digital.com (maximum coverage of Internet documents by a single index is less then 40%). Many of the documents are accessed only by a direct reference from a person with a specific knowledge. Many of the information provided by querying an index such as Yahoo are not relevant. The search process is long, queries are modified many times and many information pieces are missed.
Natural language query is one suggested replacement for Boolean query method. However, a research from Search Insider (www.searchinsider.com) indicates clearly that users prefer the Boolean query methods and that search engines such as AltaVista and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) provide require much improvement.
The present status of information search and retrieval in the Internet is characterized by long and tedious search process, poor relevancy of retrieved documents and low level of success in retrieval of relevant documents.
It is the purpose of the present invention to provide a method and tools for efficient search and retrieval of documents. The description in reference to the Internet is made in a way of example only. It would be appreciated by those skilled in the art, that the proposed method is applicable to any digital information source.